(Saint-Quentin 1886 – 1966 Cannes)
Nature morte, verre et carafe, 1925, signed Ozenfant, watercolour, gouache on thick paper, 36 x 27 cm, framed

Provenance:
The artist
Galerie Percier, Paris (label on the reverse)
Galerie Berri-Lardy, Paris, 1964
Jean Bauret Collection, 1974
European Private Collection

Literature:
Pierre Guénégan, Amédée Ozenfant 1886–1966, catalogue raisonné des
œuvres sur papier, London, 2016, no. 1925/OP-008, ill. pp. 82 and 253

This composition is informed by the Purist aesthetic as developed by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier in 1918. Drawing on pre-1914 Cubism, particularly the coolly rational interpretation of Juan Gris, they dismissed its subsequent evolution as too decorative and unordered. They felt that the chaos of the natural world should be dispelled by the organizing mechanisms of the human mind. This conviction became a moral imperative that Ozenfant and Le Corbusier attempted to uphold in their work.
Ozenfant used the following metaphor to describe the function of rational thought: “A lens concentrates the diffuse rays of the sun and creates fire by converging those rays. To converge is to refine something in nature, so as to render it more concentrated, compact, pene-trative, intense: it helps to facilitate the mani-fes-tations of that phenomenon and to render it effective and useful for humanity.” Ozenfant’s application of this principle to „Nature morte, verre et carafe“ results in a composition that is lucid and geometric. Purism, with its principle of the rational instead of the decorative, stands at the beginning of a new aesthetic that continued to be felt in Functionalism. www.guggenheim.org

Tags:
Amédée Ozenfant, Amedee Ozenfant